Page 63 of Thunder

I brought the good cooler and the folding chairs and the whole spread—cold chicken and potato salad, a couple of Mama Lou's leftover biscuits, two beers sweating in the ice, and the little battery lantern because the light'll go before we're done.

"Thunder." She's half laughing. "Did you bring me on a date? To the barn?"

"Brought supper to a woman who forgets to eat." I start unloading, ignoring the way my hip complains about the twisting. "If it turns into a date, that's on you."

We eat in the barn alley with the door open to the dying light, sitting in two folding chairs with the cooler between us for a table, and it's the best meal I've had in a month even though it's leftovers off paper plates.

She tells me about the numbers—which cows are throwing the best calves, which bull she wants to bring in next season, the paint mare she's got her eye on—and I actually follow it, because I ran stock my whole life before the club took the front seat, and there's a particular pleasure in watching a woman be that good at something.

She knows her animals.

She knows the science behind the animals.

She lights up talking about it in a way she doesn't light up about much else, and I could listen to it all night.

"You're doing that thing again," she says, catching me.

"What thing?"

"Looking at me like I hung the moon because I explained heritability estimates."

"Maybe you did." I take a pull of my beer. "Prettiest anybody ever made cattle genetics sound, I'll tell you that."

She throws a biscuit at me.

I catch it and eat it, and she laughs, and the sound of it goes through me warm.

"This is nice," she says after a minute, quieter, looking out the open door at the last of the daylight going pink over the pasture.

"I don't think I've just... sat. In weeks. Months, maybe. There's always a fire to put out. A cow to doctor, a sister to worry about, a secret to keep." She tips her head back against the chair. "I forgot you're allowed to just eat cold chicken in a barn with somebody and not be running from anything."

"That's the whole idea." I reach over and tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "You spend so much of your life takin' care of everybody else, Presley. The herd, your sisters, my kid, me. Somebody ought to bring you supper once in a while and make you sit down for it."

She catches my hand before I can pull it back, turns her face into my palm, presses a kiss there.

"Nobody ever has," she says against my skin.

"Before you. Not once."

And that hits me somewhere deep, because I know it's true.

She was raised by a good man who loved her, but he's gone now, and she came into this family a grown woman with nobody whose whole job was just her.

Well.

She's got somebody now.

The light goes gold, then blue, and I click on the little lantern, and somewhere in there the easy quiet turns into something with more weight to it.

She's watching me rub my hip without meaning to, the way I do at the end of a day.

"How is it?" she asks. "Really. Not the answer you give the club."

I think about dodging.

Then I don't, because that's the deal with her now, the whole point of her.

"Better," I say. "Real slow, but better. PT's helping. I can get through most of a day now without it puttin' me on the ground." I flex the leg out, feel the fragment pull. "But I want to ride, Presley. Not the bike, I'm back on the bike. A horse. I haven't been up on a horse since before the bunkhouse and I miss it worse than I can say. Grew up on horseback. Feels like a piece of me's just... parked."